Are you looking to strengthen and sculpt your legs?
We understand that exercising your legs can be difficult, but lunges are some of the easiest
and most effective ways to shape and tone various muscle groups in your legs.
Simply put, you can perform lunges by taking a large step forward with one leg, keeping
the foot flat on the ground, leaving the other leg behind it.
This seemingly simple exercise is harder than it seems but can work out various areas near
your buttocks, hip, knee, calf, and thigh.
The best part is, there is no equipment required.
This amazing exercise is used by everyone from cross training athletes to yogis.
And in today’s video, we will tell you why you should make it a part of your everyday
exercise routine.
From strengthening your core to increasing flexibility and more, keep watching to find
out all the benefits!
Improves Balance and Stability: One of the key benefits of lunges is that the exercise
develops your balance and stability while increasing your strength.
These are key attributes for sports performance, improving your everyday movement patterns
and preventing injury.
With lunges you are able to place the majority of the tension on one leg at a time.
This fires up the stabilising muscles of the core and lower body more so than other lower
body exercises, such as squats where your feet are parallel to each other which makes
balance less of a concern.
By regularly practising lunges you can increase your body’s capacity for balance and stability
to build a more solid foundation from which to generate force with other exercise, such
as running and weightlifting.
Improves Long Distance Running Efficiency: For perfect running form, your body needs
to be able to move with fluidity.
Excessive muscle tightness in the hips will resist your movement with every step and tax
your muscles energy even more, particularly over long distances.
Over the course of your running circuit or even a race, this extra energy that you need
to expend fighting the stiffness and resistance from your hips will lead to fatiguing faster
and cost you time.
Performing bodyweight lunges as a warm up and weighted lunges for muscle and strength
will help open up your stride, prevent injury and improve your daily movement patterns which
will improve your running efficiency.
Keep in mind, while warming up, try to concentrate on pausing at the peak of the movement to
emphasise that deep stretch of the hips as much as possible.
Increases Muscle Mass and Strength: Lunges are a very easy exercise to scale in difficulty.
If you find bodyweight lunges too easy and your goal is to add muscle mass and strength
to your lower body then you can increase the intensity of the exercise by adding weight.
Just grab a dumbbell in each hand and perform walking lunges rather than using a barbell
rested on your trapezius muscle.
Using dumbbells puts the focus on the target muscles, particularly the quads and glutes.
So you can use a higher level of resistance and stimulate your muscles especially the
quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves to grow.
Loading up the resistance with extra weight also puts more stress on the muscles and forces
them to adaptively respond by increasing in size and strength.
Lunges recruit some of the largest muscle groups in your body as its primary movers.
So, there is huge potential for you to gain muscle with weighted lunges.
Betters Lower Back Health: You can experience back pain as a result of inefficient movement
patterns where you bend at the lower back to bend down and pick something up.
This can cause a bad back particularly if you are picking up something heavy and loading
up in an unfavourable position.
The muscles in your legs are the biggest and strongest muscles in the body and the tension
should be on them rather than your spine.
Practising lunges will help strengthen your legs, glutes and core so you can bend at the
knees and hips to lift with your legs rather than bending at the back.
Bending at the back taxes your anatomy unnecessarily whereas your legs have a high capacity for
strength and therefore can easily take the muscular tension when lifting.
The increase in core strength resulting from training lunges will help stabilise and protect
your spine.
The active stretch that you get from lunging will help increase mobility from tight muscles
that restrict your natural range of motion.
If you have strong legs there is no need to sacrifice your back and endure pain because
of bending and lifting with poor movement.
Make a conscious effort to lunge when bending to pick something from the floor and you will
train your body to be stronger, improve your balance and move more efficiently.
Eventually moving like this will become natural.
Gives you a Symmetrical Physique: If you are training with weights, building a symmetrical
physique becomes essential when it comes to looking desirable.
If you’re out of proportion and have a right side that is much bigger than your left, this
will detract from your physique and leave you looking out of proportion.
One of the best things about walking lunges is the fact that they allow you to train your
left leg just as intensely as your right.
You literally do the exact same movement with the exact same amount of resistance on both
legs, for the exact amount of sets and reps.
This means that both legs get trained equally, so you can keep your leg gains symmetrical
and your wheels in proportion with one another.
Improves Your Mental Health: Believe it or not, lunges could be the solution for all
of that additional stress and strain that you’ve found yourself under as of late.
Lunges are as great a form of exercise and you’ll find that they promote the production
and secretion of chemical receptors and neurotransmitters in the body, such as dopamine, which are known
as endorphins.
Endorphins are what we secrete when our adrenaline is up and when we exercise.
Endorphins help us to feel happy, they lift our spirits, give us energy, and put us in
a fantastic mood while boosting our self-confidence.
If you find that you’re feeling down and your mental health is suffering, lunges are
the perfect solution.
Helps you lose weight: Another fantastic benefit of lunges is that they promote fat loss.
You see, lunges are very physically demanding.
You work a lot of muscles when you do this exercise, and as a result, you will burn off
a lot of calories.
If you’re looking to shed those stubborn pounds and tone everything up, don’t assume
that the treadmill is the only thing that will help you to shed body fat.
It turns out that lunges are fantastic for losing fat, meaning they’ll help you to
get a little bit leaner when performing them regularly.
Improve your Posture: With more and more people working desk jobs, back issues associated
with poor posture like back pain and discomfort are becoming more common than ever.
Lunges have been proven to help your posture, and spinal health in general.
This is all thanks to what experts call 'spinal deloading’.
You see, many exercises, especially heavy compound exercises, actually put pressure
on the spine and can cause it to become compressed.
This can be detrimental over time, but thankfully, lunges have the exact opposite effect.
Walking lunges, and other similar variations, have been found to decompress the spine and
to alleviate stress and pressure placed upon it.
This improves posture, plus it helps alleviate and prevent back pain and back issues in general.
If you suffer from back issues, lunges are fantastic exercises in terms of leg training,
and overall back health in general.
Betters Your Hip Flexibility: As we grow older, we often find that the hips are one of the
most commonly affected parts of the anatomy.
This is why older people usually require hip replacement surgeries.
Having poor hip flexibility can be a precursor to hip issues later on in life.
Besides, reduced hip mobility also means that you’ll be more likely to struggle in day
to day living.
Lunges could be the solution.
One of the most significant benefits of lunges is the fact that they’re fantastic for hip
mobility and flexibility.
Lunges help to promote flexibility within the hip flexor muscles, which in turn gives
more flexibility and movement to the hips, thighs, and even your core.
Betters muscle Coordination: Another thing that lunges are good for is increasing your
muscular coordination.
Lunges involve several muscle groups at once, mainly one leg to lunge, the other leg to
balance, and your core and back to keep you upright.
Therefore lunging involves using several muscles in unison, all of which have to work in perfect
harmony to successfully execute the exercise at hand.
Coordination is another really important part of life and is necessary for everything from
walking and running to playing sports.
Do you do lunges everyday?
What sort of exercise do you do on a daily basis?
Let us know in the comments section below!